Resolved To. Carole Buck
his back and torso, relishing the sleek ripple and release of well-toned muscle and sinew.
The catch on the front of her bra gave way to the coaxing of clever but not-quite-steady fingers. Cool air eddied briefly over freshly bared skin. Lucy shivered, catching her bottom lip between her teeth to mute a whimper of anticipation. A moment later, she felt the claiming cup of her husband’s palms against her naked flesh. She closed her eyes, arching into the allurement of his caress.
“Beautiful,” she heard Chris murmur in a reverent, rough-velvet voice. His hands were urgent, yet exquisitely gentle. He seemed to understand even better than she did where and how and when she wanted to be touched. “You’re so beautiful.”
And then she felt his mouth. His hot, hungry mouth, closing over the tip of her right breast. Licking. Laving. Sampling. Sucking. Each time his lips exerted their suctioning pressure on the burgeoning peak, there was an answering throb deep within her body.
Lucy opened her eyes. She uttered Chris’s name on a shaky whisper, her fingers spasming against his shoulders. Her nails bit briefly into the taut flesh of his upper arms as he transferred his attentions to her left breast. Again he suckled, drawing her aching nipple deep into his mouth. Again she experienced the yearning clench of response in her womb.
Chris kissed a path upward from Lucy’s bosom, drink- ing in the soft, swooning cry she made when his lips finally reclaimed hers. He was starving, he thought dizzily, and she was a feast to sate all his senses. But the more he tasted of her—the more he touched, smelled, heard and saw—the more acutely he hungered.
“Yes,” she said on a sigh when he finally ended the kiss. “Oh, yes.”
He undid her sheer stockings and carefully peeled them off. Lucy watched silently as he did so, her expression ratcheting up old appetites at the same time it roused new ones. Her cheeks were flushed, almost feverish-looking. Her ripe mouth was moist and trembling.
My wife, he told himself triumphantly, touching the ball of his thumb against the plain gold ring that now adorned his left hand. My... wife.
He charted the shape of her legs with his hands in ardent, appreciative stages. From her prettily pedicured toes to her well-turned ankles. From her well-turned ankles to the backs of her knees. From the backs of her knees to the satin-cream skin of her inner thighs.
His fingertips hovered for an instant at the apex of her limbs, brushing lightly against the dampened fabric that shielded the entrance to her feminine core. His mind flashed back to the first time they’d made love. To the crazy jumble of emotions he’d experienced knowing that he was to be the recipient of something that could be surrendered only once.
He’d felt awed.
He’d felt unworthy.
He’d felt invincible.
He felt much the same right now.
“Chris—” Lucy began in a half-suffocated voice, propping herself up on her elbows.
“I need you, sweetheart,” he said huskily, sliding his palms over the silky fabric of her panties and hooking his thumbs beneath the lace-trimmed top edge. “All of you.”
Her dark lashes fluttered down a fraction of an inch, veiling a wildfire kindling in the depths of her expressive eyes. The corners of her lips curled in the start of a smile that sizzled through his bloodstream. A throbbing heaviness invaded his loins. Desire clawed in his gut like a jungle cat.
A languid lift of lushly feminine hips.
A swift downward tug by long-fingered male hands.
The last scrap of Lucy’s lingerie fluttered to the plushly carpeted floor, leaving her naked.
Chris swallowed convulsively, struggling for control as he surveyed the newly revealed flesh and the lovely triangle of dark, glossy curls. He disciplined himself to ease up, shift back. Forced himself to get to his feet.
He opened the buckle of his belt. Unzipped his fly.
Shucked his trousers and the briefs beneath them down his legs in a single seamless movement.
Kicked the garments off ... and away.
Lucy’s breath jammed in her throat at the sight of Chris’s sleekly powerful physique and flagrantly aroused masculinity. She’d been afraid the first time, she dimly remembered. Not so much of the hurt, although she’d been warned that was inevitable. No, her deepest fear had centered around the awful possibility that she’d fail to please at something it seemed all her friends found as natural as scratching.
There had been no hurt. A moment of discomfort, yes, but one so buffered by tenderness that she could scarcely be sure she’d really experienced it. And if she’d been less than adequate in her innocence, she hadn’t been able to discern it. Chris had responded to her as though she were Eve incarnate.
She dragged her gaze slowly upward, conscious of the pound-pound-pounding of her blood. She could hear it, hammering in her ears. She could feel it, pulsing in the tips of her toes and fingers.
Dark eyes locked with hazel ones, much as they’d done on a hot summer night barely six months before.
Lucy lifted her arms.
Chris rejoined her on the king-size bed.
They kissed. Caressed. Rolled across the crisp white sheets in a tangle of perspiration-sheened legs and arms. She found herself laughing with joy one moment, gasping in shocked pleasure the next. She said her husband’s name over and over again. He murmured hers, and a dozen different endearments besides. Then, in a lightning-quick change of mood, he nipped at the lobe of her right ear and began whispering a litany of darkly delicious promises.
His hands were everywhere. Testing. Tempting. Torching her flesh. She reciprocated in kind, charting the strong expanse of his shoulders, the long, taut line of his torso and the flat plane of his stomach. The shallow indentation of his navel held her strangely in thrall for several shuddering seconds, and then she shifted her tactile attentions downward a few inches.
“Lucy.” Chris speared his fingers through her hair. “Oh...Lucy.”
“Yes.” The word was an affirmation. An invitation. “Yes.”
They rolled over again. She ended up beneath him, feeling the nudge of his knee between her thighs as his mouth took hers in another searing kiss.
She opened eagerly, arching upward in welcome as Chris filled her with a strong, sure thrust. A glorious sensation surged through her veins. She wrapped her arms and legs around him as her consciousness narrowed to exclude everything but the moment...and the man.
Chris groaned hoarsely, his embrace tightening. His spine bowed, the intimacy of his possession of her increasing by a few ineffably exquisite degrees.
Closer. And closer still.
She shuddered, her body convulsing on the brink of sensory overload. Her brain seemed to blank out, as though it were too overwhelmed to form anything approaching a coherent thought. Then, suddenly, she shattered.
An instant later, she felt her partner do the same.
Lucy had wondered if it would be different, making love as husband and wife, not simply man and woman. In the midst of a molten flood of ecstasy, she learned that it was. Deeply, indescribably different.
She’d never dreamed that it could be better.
She should have.
Chris liked to cuddle afterward.
This had taken Lucy by surprise. According to her female friends, most guys were savvy enough to understand that most girls expected some foreplay before the main event. Unfortunately, these friends averred, disappointingly few members of the opposite sex had gotten it through their thick skulls that women craved a little afterplay, too.
“They get off,” Tina Roberts had once informed her with a disdainful gesture. “They want you to tell ‘em it was great. They roll over and start-snoring.